Monthly Archives: February 2014

IBM has challenged developers to come up with ways to get the vast brain of its supercomputer Watson on to the world’s mobile phones.

Watson is an artificially intelligent computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language.

It also has access to 200 million pages of information, drawn from books, encyclopaedias and other databases.

Apps could include more advanced Siri-like voice recognition systems or tools that can accurately translate text.

“The power of Watson in the palm of your hand is a game-changing proposition, so we’re calling on mobile developers around the world to start building cognitive computing apps infused with Watson’s intelligence,” said Mike Rhodin, senior vice president of IBM Watson Group.

Medical help

The competition is the latest attempt from IBM to launch Watson as a viable business. It has invested $1bn (£601m) in the system and late last year announced that it would open it up to developers.

To date, more than 1,500 individuals and organisations have been in touch to suggest apps. Three intend to go to market this year, including an app to transform how consumers shop and one to help hospitals better procure devices.

The Watson Mobile Developer Challenge begins on 31 March when developers can submit ideas. Later in the year, IBM will select 25 finalists to turn their ideas into working software.

Other potential Watson-powered mobile apps could include medical ones to help doctors and patients sift through vast amounts of data.

Medical information doubles every five years and Watson can analyse vast amounts to allow doctors to offer patients more treatment options as well as help researchers make medical breakthroughs.

Already Watson is being used by doctors and nurses at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, in New York, to help make decisions about lung cancer treatment at the hospital.

According to IBM Watson’s business chief Manoj Saxena, 90% of nurses who use Watson now follow its guidance.

In the field of education, IBM envisages teachers being able to tap into Watson to identify individual pupil’s needs and offer bespoke learning packages for each child.

Imagine 5G Bandwidth meets the computational power of Watson. Now we are talking mobile domination. This is a Yakir Group recommended follow.

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Trivia king

Watson competed in and won Jeopardy in 2011

Watson has got smaller and faster over the years. What started as a system the size of a bedroom is now the size of three stacked pizza boxes. It is also available via the cloud, meaning it can be accessed from anywhere.

It can process 500 gigabytes of information – equivalent to a million books – every second.

And it has proved its abilities. In 2011 it appeared on the Jeopardy game show answering general knowledge questions, without being connected to the internet.

Pitted against the two biggest winners of the trivia quiz show, despite a few stumbles it eventually walked away with the $1m prize.

You are beginning to think that I have an obsession with this. I do and so should all of you in our community. Net Neutrality is currently the biggest issue which will affect the future of the Net.
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FCC revives net neutrality

by Kate Tummarello, thehill.comFebruary 19th 2014 11:22 AM
The Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday said it plans to revive the net-neutrality rules that were overturned in court.

Tom Wheeler, the FCC’s chairman, is taking a series of steps aimed at ensuring that Internet providers treat all traffic the same, the agency said.

The future of the the “open Internet” rules was left in doubt last month after an appeals court overturned them on the grounds that the agency overstepped its authority.
In its ruling, the court said the FCC’s net-neutrality rules treated Internet providers too similarly to the way the agency treats traditional phone companies, which are more heavily regulated.

During a press call Wednesday, a senior agency official said Wheeler will not be attempting to reclassify Internet providers, nor will the FCC appeal the court’s decision.

Instead, Wheeler will start a new process and seek public comment to create rules that keep providers from blocking and slowing access to websites, the official said.

Wheeler will look to the agency’s Data Roaming Order — a set of 2011 rules that requires wireless companies to offer data roaming arrangements to each other on “commercially reasonable terms and conditions” — which a federal court upheld after Verizon Wireless challenged the rules, according to the official.

The FCC will also enhance the net-neutrality rules’ transparency provision, which requires Internet providers to be transparent about how they manage network traffic and was upheld by the federal court earlier this year.

In the meantime, Wheeler will hold Internet providers to the commitments they have made to follow the principles of an open Internet, the official said.